International Media Studies: Media Literacy as a Media Competence for Social Change Erasmus Project

Project Title

International Media Studies: Media Literacy as a Media Competence for Social Change

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Capacity Building in higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics:

Project Summary

The overall aim of the project was to build the foundation for more media literate societies in South East Asia (Malaysia, Thailand & Vietnam) in order to cope with the challenges of social change in modern societies. Important drivers for such transformations are media effects on social practice (mediatization and medialization), influencing culture, economics, politics and other societal spheres.In contrast to many other programs that deal with these phenomena by focusing on digital literacy skills like programming, media production, and education to tackle problems like fake news, filter bubbles & hate speech – this project operated on a more comprehensive level. The project aimed at a transformation of the operating system itself, by using Higher Education Institutions as places to connect important stakeholders within these societies to think about arising needs as well as societal and cultural goals in the face of global and local developments. To implement this future-studies-guided approach the project defined, planned and realized multiple work packages: • An Action-Research oriented Delphi Study to do research on the current knowledge and future demands of Media Literacy combined with the attempt to find and activate stakeholders was conducted. This made it possible to incorporate desires and needs of stakeholders beyond the higher education system.• A series of Train-the-Faculty workshops that presented different perspectives and tools within a diverse theoretical concept of Media Literacy and its educational institutionalization were organized. By educating and training HEI lecturers the project lay the foundations for future impact on media-related courses, curriculums but also for future basic and applied research.• Additionally, lecturers were trained to plan, develop and test E-Learning materials to put their newly acquired knowledge to use. Part of this training process was to develop MOOCs that address students as well as the general public. While it was originally planned to create one MOOC in multiple languages, it was later decided to launch three different MOOCs, one for each country, as this allowed for greater acceptability and sustainability since the courses could be tailored to the needs of the individual HEIs, allowing also the use as blended-learning materials for the regular curriculum courses. All MOOCs are available via the openlearning.com platform. • Furthermore, the consortium was extended into a Media Literacy Network (MEDLITnet) that promotes Media Literacy and develop future projects. Partners from Malaysia are leading this network for the next two years.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 999748,5 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAT WIEN & Country: AT

Project Partners

• HOC VIEN BAO CHI VA TUYEN TRUYEN
• CHULALONGKORN UNIVERSITY
• UNIVERSITI PUTRA MALAYSIA
• UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES HO CHI MINH CITY
• SRINAKHARINWIROT UNIVERSITY
• OPEN UNIVERSITEIT NEDERLAND
• UNIVERSITI MALAYSIA KELANTAN